Oberheim Two Voice Pro vs Dave Smith Instruments OB-6 Synthesizer

The new OB-6 is not intended to replicate the Oberheim Two Voice, but has a synth engine ‘inspired by Oberheim’s original SEM’. The Two Voice is an updated version of Oberheim’s classic Two Voice synth, built around a pair of modern SEM modules.

Here’s what kpsiegel has to say about the video demo:

In this video I took my Oberheim Two Voice Pro and matched as best as I could without going nuts settings that were similar to my Dave Smith Instruments OB-6. No effects were used. The point was to hear how these two sounded in comparison given an approximately equal patch configuration.

I made sure that my unison patch on the OB-6 only used two voices. I used a digital tuner to make sure that each oscillator was tuned a fourth away from the other. The two voice was in unison mode with both SEMs set for the same filter and envelope configurations. Both synths used modified pulse waves with PWM from a sine lfo.

Do not assume that a two voice and an OB-6 are comparable based on this video. The two voice can have totally different configurations on each voice stacked in unison and there is no way to replicate that on an OB-6 with the current software because you would need multis to do that.

You will hear modulation of the OB-6 filter at times and that is being done by an expression pedal that I hooked up to the OB-6. This helps get around the annoying limitation of only allowing the mod wheel on the OB-6 to control LFO depth. This is a way to get that manual modulation of the filter without aftertouch or the mod wheel. I set the two voice pro up to have mod wheel fed to both SEM VCF CV inputs to modify cutoff.

The 2voice has a much more creamier sound & very unison friendly. I think the OB-6 cutoff could have been a touch higher for the comparison to more accurate & some different sounds analysed, apart from chords of course. I’d like to try both at some time but with that presentation the 2v wins hands down.

The Oberhiem 2 Voice is notorious for going out of tune quickly, as heard in this video. The cutoff on the OB-6 is not set bright enough. You can’t set two knobs in the same position, and expect them to sound the same. He should re-examine this demo again.